Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't have a company and have no interest (maybe you don't even know what that is), in case you have email address, you have experienced the uglier side of email marketing. You've probably even seen the advertisements for email address lists offering thousands-or even millions-of email addresses. Did you ever wonder how anyone could come up with so many addresses?
You will be sure of one thing: in the event the price is inexpensive, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these tremendous lists are loaded with “harvested” email addresses. They are comparable to some summary of street addresses chosen from the telephone book.
There isn't any phone book so where do these cheapo lists come from? Mostly, the addresses are harvested from web logs, student or membership lists, newsgroups, message boards, forums, as well as other locations where people gather to swap advice. They don't know their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. They did not ask to be added to a mass e-mail list. And they certainly did not ask to have their inboxes polluted with junk.
Picking email addresses is legal. But it is widely considered unethical. You pay a fine or will not go to jail. But you might hurt your business, perhaps irreparably. The possible outcomes for violating the unwritten rule to having your business, from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain name.